394 Quotes by Bob Dylan

I don't know what everybody else was fantasizing about but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. [...] After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back.

I'll always thank the Lord when my working day is through, I get my sweet reward to be alone with you.

Don't want to wink at nobody, don't want to be winked at Don't want to be used by nobody for a doormat Don't want to confuse nobody, don't want to be confused Don't want to amuse nobody, don't want to be amused.

On the cliffs of your wild cat charms I'm riding.

So many things that we never will undo I know you're sorry, I'm sorry too.

Things are going to happen whether I know why they happen or not. You don't find out why things move. You let them move; you watch them move; you stop them from moving: you start them moving. But you don't sit around and try to figure out why there's movement.

My love, she's like some raven At my window with a broken wing.

All the money you make will never buy back your soul.

Without freedom of speech, I might be in the swamp.

Steal a little and they'll put you in jail, steal a lot and they'll make you king.

In the fury of the moment I can see the Master's hand In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.

Situations have ended sad Relationships have all been bad Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud But there's no way I can compare.

Philosophical dogma doesn't interest me.

If you try to be anyone but yourself, you will fail; if you are not true to your own heart, you will fail. Then again, there's no success like failure.

You can't do something forever.

You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

A lot of people don't like the road, but it's as natural to me as breathing.

You're gonna have to serve somebody; well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody.

Although the masters make the rules for the wise men and the fools, I've got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's AT somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you'll sort of be alright.

Half of the people can be part right all of the time, Some of the people can be all right part of the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that. 'I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,' I said that.

Yet there's no one to beat you | No one t' defeat you | 'Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad.

The answer is blowin' in the wind.

How many roads must a man walk down Before your can call him a man? ... The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind.

You say you're looking for someone who'll pick you up each time you fall, to gather flowers constantly and to come each time you call, a lover your life and nothing more. But it ain't me, babe.

There's been rumors of war and wars that have been The meaning of life has been lost in the wind And some people thinkin' that the end is close by 'Stead of learnin' to live they are learnin' to die.

I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me.

Privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back.

They asked me for some collateral and I pulled down my pants.

I didn't come out of a cereal box.

Freedom just around the corner for you, but with the truth so far off, what good will it do?

The enemy is subtle, how be it we are so deceived, when truth's in our hearts and we still don't believe.

How many deaths will it take 'till we know that too many people have died?

I like spiritual songs. They struck me as truthful and serious. They brought me down to earth and they lifted me up all in the same moment.

The truth that I am seeking is in your missing file.

Some formulas are too complex and I don't want anything to do with them.

If you like someone's work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years.

Sometimes the things that you liked the best and that have meant the most to you are the things that meant nothing at all to you when you first heard or saw them.

Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools, you got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules. When you gonna wake up?

I always thought the best kind of sunglasses are the motorcycle helmets with the black plastic masks on them. That way, nobody can recognize the back of your head either.

That's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after.

The hollow horn plays wasted words, proves to warn that he not busy being born is busy dying.

When you got nothing, you got nothin' to lose You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

Wasn't making any great connection

Wasn't falling for any intricate scheme

Nothing that would pass inspection

Just thinking of a series of dreams.

The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie. Then you're all the time defending what you can never justify.

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

There's no liquor in the land that can stop your brain from bleedin.

There's a wall between you and what you want and you got to leap it.

I don't have the kinds of relationships that are built on any kind of false pretense, not to say that I haven't. I've had just as many as anybody else, but I haven't had them in a long time.

When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud, I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship.

I'm not a playwright.

I'm not going to read any of these magazines. I mean, because they've just got too much to lose by printing the truth. You know that.

I never read Freud. I've never been attracted to anything he has said, and I think he's started a lot of nonsense with psychiatry and that business. I don't think psychiatry can help or has helped anybody. I think it's a big fraud (pun not intended) on the public.

If I made records for my own pleasure, I would only record Charley Patton songs.

I find C major to be the key of strength, but also the key of regret. E major is the key of confidence. A-flat major is the key of renunciation.

The drunken politician leaps upon the street where mothers weep, and the saviors who are fast asleep, they wait for you.

They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king.

Some things are too terrible to be true.

You breathed on me and made my life a richer one to live, when I was deep in poverty you taught me how to give. Dried the tears up from my dreams and pulled me from my hole, quenched my thirst and satisfied the burning in my soul.

Sometimes the silence can be like thunder.

Sing your praise of progress and the doom machine, the naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen.

I march in the parade of liberty But as long as I love you I'm not free How long must I suffer such abuse Won't you let me see you smile one time before I turn you loose?

Doesn't expecting the unexpected make the unexpected expected?

It's sundown on the union
And what's made in the USA
Sure was a good idea
'Til greed got in the way.

Uncle fought in Vietnam and then he fought a war all by himself.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past -- whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

Bob Dylan was again an entirely new person -- this time old, craggy, cynical, and world-weary, as in Not Dark Yet.

I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes. You'd know what a drag it is to see you.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That's always been the easy way. It's not that it's so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it's just that there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

I met a young man who was wounded in love, I met another man who was wounded in hatred.

Every man's conscience is vile and depraved You cannot depend on it to be your guide when it's you who must keep it satisfied.

Got no religion. Tried a bunch of different religions. The churches are divided. Can't make up their minds and neither can I.

Aretha with no goals, eternally single and one step soft of heaven let it be understood that she owns this melody along with her emotional diplomats and her earth and her musical secrets.

Ain't nothing too discreet about the disease of conceit.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark as human gods aim for their mark.

We don't see the people that vice destroys. We just see the glamour of it -- everywhere we look, from billboard signs to movies, to newspapers, to magazines. We see the destruction of human life.

I like the fans, but I don't feel an obligation that I have to be an example to them, like say maybe a baseball player would, or a football player or maybe some other type of musicians. I don't feel I have to really set an example that somebody else has to live up to.

You been down to the bottom with a bad man, babe But you're back were you belong.

The cavalries charged and the Indians died, oh the country was young with God on its side.

If you want to know how to please a woman, just talk to a neuroscience major from Columbia.

Music can save people, but it can't in the commercial way it's being used. It's just too much. It's pollution.

A record ... is a statement, it's its own statement, its own entity, rather than being about something else. If I was a painter ... I don't paint the chair, I would paint feelings about the chair.

Well I'm living in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line. Beauty walks a razor's edge...someday I'll make it mine.

All that foreign oil controlling American soil.

People don't live or die, people just float.

For whose sake did you live, for whose sake did you die? Forgive me, baby, for what I didn't do.

A lot of people don't have much food on their table. But they got a lot of forks 'n knives. And they got to cut somethin'.

One was Texas medicine, the other was just railroad gin, and like a fool I mixed them.

Satan will give you a little taste, then he'll move in with rapid speed.

Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.

Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you.

Shakespeare, he's in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells, speaking to some French girl who says she knows me well.

He Ray was working in a tool-and-die factory in Brooklyn, but before that had drifted around, had been employed at the Studebaker plant in South Bend and also at an Omaha slaughterhouse on the kill floor. Once I asked him what that was like. You ever heard of Auschwitz?

And if anybody asks me is it easy to forget I'll say it is easily done, you just pick anyone, and pretend that you never have met.

The cards are no good that your are holding unless you're from another world.

Sold my guitar to the baker's son for a few crumbs and a place to hide.

I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now. From the back pages.

I have tried my hand at bribery, blackmail, and deceit. And I've served time for everything, cept beggin on the street.

You're better than no one and no one is better than you.

As he weeps to wicked birds of prey, who pick up on his bread crumb sins, and there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden.

In my dreams, crowds were chanting, challenging me, shouting, Follow us and fit in! I wanted to tell him that life itself has turned into a prowling lion. I wanted to tell him that I needed to escape the blaze of bullshit.

In writing songs, I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.

Dead man, dead man
When will you arise?
Cobwebs in your mind
Dust upon your eyes.

You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies. One day you'll be in the ditch, flies buzzin' around your eyes.

Charity is suppose to cover up for a multitude of sins.

It will scramble your head and drag your brain about, sometimes you gotta do like Elvis did and shoot the damn thing out.

Well the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount, But nothing really matters much it's doom alone that counts.

The man in the coon skin cap in the pig pen wants eleven dollar bills, you've only got ten.

Because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind.

You have to work out where your place is. And who you are. But we're all spirit. That's all we are, we're just walking dressed up in a suit of skin, and we're going to leave that behind.

You've got to lose your passion for dumbness.

I fought with my twin, the enemy within.

I once loved a girl, her skin it was bronze With the innocence of a lamb, she was gentle like a fawn I courted her proudly but now she is gone Gone as the season she's taken.

The executioner's face is always well hidden.

Done so many evil things in the name of love, it's a crying shame. I never did see no fire that could put out a flame.

May God bless and keep you always, May your wishes all come true, May you always do for others And let others do for you. May you build a ladder to the stars And climb on every rung, May you stay forever young.

You five and ten cent women with nothing in your heads, I got a real gal I'm loving and Lord I'll love her 'til I'm dead.

When I first heard Elvis' voice, I knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody ... hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.

Your mind is a your temple, keep it beautiful and free. Don't let an egg get laid in it by something you can't see.

God knows there's a heaven.

I really don't like to hurt myself. I have a good understanding with all the women who have been in my life, whether I see them occasionally or not.

Sailin' 'round the world in a dirty gondola

Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

She had bullets in her eyes and they fired.

I've never gone for having a great voice, for cultivating one. I'm still not doing it now.

Rod's a great singer. He's got a great voice, but there's no point to put a 30-piece orchestra behind him. I'm not going to knock anybody's right to make a living but you can always tell if somebody's heart and soul is into something, and I didn't think Rod was into it in that way.

How many times have you heard someone say If I had his money I'd do things my way Hmm, but little they know Hmm, it's so hard to find One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.

I believe in you, even though I be outnumbered.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Oh, the inmates and the prisoners I found they were my kind And it was there inside the bars I found my peace of mind But the jails they were too crowded Institutions overflowed So they turned me loose to walk upon Life's hurried tangled road.

Get jailed, jump bail, join the Army if you fail.

To preach of peace and brotherhood, oh what might be the cost? A man he did it long ago, and they hung him on a cross.

Well, it's always been my nature to take chances My right hand drawing back while my left hand advances.

Maybe in the 90s or possibly in the next century people will look upon the 80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the limit; that might be all that's going on right now in a big way.

Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues; you can tell by the way she smiles.

I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.

He hands you a nickel, he hands you a dime. He asks you with a grin, if you're having a good time.

Advertising signs: they con you into thinking you're the one That can do what's never been done That can win what's never been won Meantime life outside goes on all around you.